[PD] changing the look of Pd to be more readable

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Mon, 5 Nov 2007, Luke Iannini (pd) wrote:

> Speaking of the "more inside" concept: I strongly support subpatch
> differentiation, since personally I use subpatches primarily for patch
> organization rather than as impromptu abstractions, but you are already
> convinced : ).

in jMax, subpatch boxes had a special look (the box was all teal instead 
of white with a teal outline), but abstraction instances looked just like 
any other kind of object. I think that there was a good reason for this.

> It might be a good time to look at doing a "grammar" style identification of
> objects to choose their style; this would get a lot closer to syntax
> highlighting.  It would be cool to see all iemmatrix objects, or all list
> processing objects highlighted in a different style.  And this would of
> course solve the subpatch styling, since one could just look for "^pd .*".

I agree that there could be options for this. I don't think that 
distinguishing abstraction instances from other boxes should be done by 
default or encouraged, but it could deserve to be turned on temporarily on 
some occasions.

> And not to push my luck, but is it possible for the theme changes to 
> live-update rather than only applying to new windows?  I only ask 
> because it would open some fun patch-UI hacks.

it's possible, I've done it, but it does not extend to the choice of 
translation. If e.g. I open a patch in Japanese and I switch the language 
to Russian, the already existing windows would continue to be in Japanese, 
while the new ones will be in Russian. (at this point, I delay the loading 
of translations to the next run of pd, so that the program continues to be 
in one language. Updating every gui element is hard)

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal QC Canada